Earlier this week, more than a dozen Jewish organizations signed a statement accusing the ADL of “racist and Islamophobic attacks on our mayor-elect [that] undermine our shared commitment to confronting both antisemitism and Islamophobia in New York City”. Mamdani told reporters that “anyone is free to catalog the actions of our administration.” He added, in reference to a false statement made by Greenblatt in a CNBC interview: “I have some doubts about Jonathan [Greenblatt]’s ability to do so honestly, given that he previously said I had not visited any synagogues, only to have to correct himself.”
The Nexus Project was established in 2019 as an effort to foster education about antisemitism, particularly as it intersects with issues relating to Israel. It is behind a definition of antisemitism that is often presented as an alternative to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) one, which has been increasingly adopted by US universities and policymakers despite its conflation of some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
But increasingly, the Nexus Project is also dealing with questions of authoritarianism in the US, Jacoby noted. It recently published a blueprint that challenges the rightwing approach to combating antisemitism embraced by the administration, which largely mirrors the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther plan to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement in the US.
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[ADL] has been widely criticized for narrowing its anti-extremism and civil rights mission to focus on pro-Israel activism, and recently took down its online “glossary of extremism”, which included information on the far right, after it came under fire from Elon Musk and rightwing influencers. The ADL was once considered an authority on tracking antisemitic incidents, but the credibility of its data has increasingly been challenged for framing peaceful pro-Palestinian actions, including by Jews themselves, as antisemitic.